


Persephone Transversing the Underworld

by TheBabbleRabble



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Amaurot (Final Fantasy XIV), Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers Spoilers, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Major Character Injury, Not Really Character Death, Pining, Suicidal Thoughts, no beta we die like fools
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-02-23 13:48:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23712487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBabbleRabble/pseuds/TheBabbleRabble
Summary: “G’raha doesn’t know how long he’s walked the streets of this city of ghosts. There is no day or night to mark the time, and his own internal clock has gone silent on him. His pain—from his bullet-broken ribs, the entry and exit wounds through his torso, and his heart, oh his heart—never dulls, never proves to him that this is more than one agonizing moment, less than an eternity in hell.He begins to measure time by Emet-Selch instead.”G’raha Tia wanders the false Amaurot, awaiting either (unlikely) salvation or (meaningless) death. If only Emet-Selch would leave him alone in the meantime.
Relationships: Solus zos Galvus | Emet-Selch/G'raha Tia | Crystal Exarch
Comments: 6
Kudos: 43





	Persephone Transversing the Underworld

**Author's Note:**

> CONTENT WARNING: G'raha spends like this entire fic assuming he's on the cusp of death and acting accordingly--he wants to find a place to die with dignity. I don't know if it's necessarily suicidal thoughts, but I wasn't sure how else to tag it. Basically, read responsibly and take care of yourself.  
> This story includes my personal canon for FFXIV, aka there's four WOLs, a group of adopted sisters. They don't play heavily into this but are mentioned.

Before he is aware of the darkness, the voice, his own name—before there is anything, there is pain. It saturates his very being, sinks into his nerves, wraps itself around his bones. He only knows the shape of himself because it burns. Agony demarcates his form from the cold stone around him.

He’s been shot.

Emet-Selch shot him.

And with this realization comes an entirely different, entirely worse sort of pain. G’raha reenters his body with a sobbing gasp, with grief sloshing over the sides, displaced by the weight of his awareness.

“You’re awake.” That voice, soft with some emotion G’raha can no longer stomach. Footsteps approaching, and a gloved hand cupping his jaw, tilting his head. G’raha flinches back, and the voice tuts at him. “Lie still, dear Exarch. It will be over soon enough.”

“You— _you—_ ” G’raha manages, tasting blood. He does not open his eyes. He knows who he will see, and he does not want to see it. Does not want this to be real.

“I, I, I,” the voice mocks him, still gentle. A thumb strokes G’raha’s cheekbone, only for a fraction of a second before the hand pulls away. It presses against his chest, presses him down against the blessedly cool stone beneath him. “Lie still, I said. I would offer you a feather bed, but we must both conserve our strength.”

Cold lips brush over G’raha’s brow. The affection cuts deeper than the bullet did, deeper still for coming too late.

He wants to scream, to rage, to sob out all his hurts both petty and soul-shattering. He wants to grab Emet-Selch by the shoulders and shake him until something resembling a heart falls out. He wants to go back to this morning—was it only this morning?—two cups of tea, a smile he had come to enjoy seeing, the peace of purpose settled into his chest. A moment, where their hands had touched and possibility had unfurled before his eyes, bright, bright, bright.

(He should have been brave, taken the chance—)

He can do none of these things, and does not know whether it is the helpless rage, the heartbreak, or the physical wounds which drag him back to unconsciousness.

0

G’raha is alone when he next wakes, either seconds or days later.

The room is dark, only the faint glow of his crystal arm—fainter than it should be, just how far is he from the Tower?—lighting the space. Even so, he can see enough. It is a small room...no, not small, but crowded with overly-large furniture, as though everything was made to accommodate beings even larger than roedagyns. The stone bench on which he lies could fit three more bodies comfortably.

He levers himself up without much concern for his wounds. Every last ilm of his body already hurts so badly, the new pain of moving hardly registers.

Still, he thinks from the ground, he should have expected his knees to give out when he went to stand. His body is weak, weak, _weak_ , heavy with heartbreak and fatigue, oozing blood, leaking aether like a broken water shard.

His staff leans against the arm of the bench, and G’raha forces himself toward it, uses it to raise his body back up to its feet. How did it get here? Could Emet-Selch have—G’raha shies from the thought, focuses his mind entirely on putting one foot in front of the other.

 _I have to get out of this room_ , he thinks, and does not know why. What use is it? The Warriors of Light are likely dead or transformed by now. His plans have all come undone. He will perish in this dark place without ever having helped anyone, without changing anything.

G’raha reaches the door and, exhausted, leans his forehead against it. The cool stone reminds him of cold lips against his brow. His own lips curl into a snarl.

 _I have to get out of this room_ , he thinks with renewed purpose. _This isn’t where I want to die._

He wants to die in an explosion of Light and crystal, in victory and at peace. Such salvation is far out of his reach now, but G’raha will be damned to all seven hells and more if he lets himself wither away in this room, where Emet-Selch had placed him like a souvenir and touched him like a lover.

G’raha pushes the door open, and limps out into a city of ghosts.

0

Emet-Selch finds him before he has made it even two blocks.

He appears so suddenly, G’raha rebounds off his chest. Hands take hold of G’raha’s shoulders and prevent him from falling. He wishes he had fallen instead. Fallen right through the ground and into a different hell than this one.

“You should be resting, you stubborn thing,” his own personal devil sighs. G’raha cannot look at him, at the man he had come slowly, steadily to admire. All that burgeoning fondness knocked askew in an instant, shattered along with his ribs, now curdled to something at once spiteful and bittersweet. “Your wounds—”

“Do _not_ ,” G’raha rasps, pausing as harsh coughs rack through him, “do not pretend to care about my wounds. Monster. It’s your fault that—that—”

Emet-Selch snatches his hands away as though burned, leaving G’raha reeling for balance. The sneer is audible in the Ascian’s voice: “And I suppose you would rather I had let you kill yourself in a blaze of glory, hm?”

“ _Yes_.” The force he puts behind the word leaves G’raha bent double, choking on air, clinging to his staff for support. He feels fingertips brush against his elbow and twists away, snarling. “At least—” _there would have been some meaning to it._ G’raha cannot get the rest of the sentence out, goes down to one knee as his lungs attempt to evacuate through his throat.

Again, fingertips hover. He shakes his head like a wild beast.

Weak he may be, but not so weak as to crumble into Emet-Selch’s arms. That embrace is a worse deathbed than the room he left behind.

“Fine,” Emet-Selch hisses. “Stubborn fool. Die like a dog in the street, for all I care. Die like the idiot you are.”

G’raha manages to gasp out, “Gladly,” but his voice is lost under the sound of Emet-Selch teleporting away.

In time, the coughing fades. The pain remains, white-hot and constant, but G’raha gets back to his feet. This place, too. The air still rings with Emet-Selch’s voice. G’raha refuses to die beneath that echo.

So he walks on.

0

G’raha doesn’t know how long he’s walked the streets of this city of ghosts. There is no day or night to mark the time, and his own internal clock has gone silent on him. The city blocks blur together between darkness and teary eyes. His pain—from his bullet-broken ribs, the entry and exit wounds through his torso, and his heart, oh his heart—never dulls, never proves to him that this is more than one agonizing moment, less than an eternity in hell.

He begins to measure time by Emet-Selch instead.

“What do you think this will accomplish?” Emet-Selch says. G’raha imagines his arms are crossed, his face set in that half-curious, half-contemptuous look of his, but keeps his eyes closed against it. “Aside from hastening your demise, I mean.”

G’raha has paused to catch his breath. It is the fourth time Emet-Selch has come to torment him, each time asking the same question incessantly and eventually growing bored enough by G’raha’s silence that he leaves again. G’raha cannot find it in himself to be surprised, despite how their first encounter ended.

The man loves a captive audience, and G’raha is the only real person for malms and malms.

“You cannot ignore me forever, dear Raha.” There is a smug smile in Emet-Selch’s voice. G’raha tells himself not to, and rises to the bait anyway.

“You, of all people, do not get to call me that.” His voice doesn’t shake. It’s the only part of him that doesn’t, though. Were it not for the wall behind him, the staff supporting his weight, G’raha thinks his body might shake itself apart. His crystallized flesh sputters like a faulty electrical socket, vibrates like glass at the wrong pitch.

Emet-Selch laughs bitterly, moving closer. G’raha does not push him away only because he isn’t sure he can raise his arms without shattering them.

Breath ruffles the fur of G’raha’s ears. _I always forget how tall he is_ drips through his mind at a pace roughly equivalent to a drunken snail’s. This time, at least, Emet-Selch does not touch him. G’raha doubts he could handle that with any sort of grace at the moment. Before he came to this city, before Innocence, before a bullet shattered through his world, G’raha had allowed himself to like this man—this Ascian, this demon.

And look where it led him.

“...is a bit unfair of me,” Emet-Selch is saying. “After all, I’ve never given you _my_ name. Shall we trade them, then? I’ll call you Raha, and you call me—”

“Emet-Selch,” G’raha cuts him off, head lolling back against the wall. He opens one eye and finally looks at his dear demon, watches tired disappointment morph into an affected, clownish pout as soon as Emet-Selch sees him looking. “I really, truly, do not care to hear it.”

The Ascian is blessedly silent for a moment. Then, with an exaggerated shrug and a put-upon sigh, he turns away but does not, unfortunately, leave. “Oh, fine, have it your way. You never answered my question. What are you hoping to accomplish?”

“And here I assumed...” A pause, a gasping breath before he can continue, “you were quite happy to let me...” and again, “die like a dog.”

Another stretch of silence. G’raha wonders if this encounter has finally ended, when Emet-Selch’s shoulders slump inward like the weight of a hundred stars rests on them. He says something too quiet for G’raha to hear over the din of his broken, protesting body.

“Though I...shudder to say it...speak up, Emet...Selch.”

“I could heal you.” His shoulders shake, his head falls back to look at the sky, as though it contains some answer. “You need not die here, G’raha Tia.”

G’raha feels a twisted smile tug at his mouth, wastes his scant breath on the cackle that bursts out. Once more, he finds himself bent double, only his staff keeping him on his feet. Wild laughter tears through him, cut by choking coughs and desperate gasps for air as his voice shrieks higher, higher, higher with some bastard child of hysteria and incredulous rage. Oh, oh, _oh_ , he hopes Emet-Selch is proud to be the first man to make someone literally die of laughter.

There is blood on his tongue and black spots when he tries to open his eyes. A hand rubs at his back, another wipes tears from his cheeks, and G’raha cannot, in this state, escape Emet-Selch’s awful, gentle touch.

 _How dare you_ , he mouths, but the words can’t make it out past the laughter. _How dare you, how dare you. You have destroyed everything I loved, everything I built, how dare you offer me my life._

( _How dare you_ , a tiny shard of his heart screams, _how dare you touch me like this now, after everything you’ve done. How dare you allow me to hope, to care, to want and then shatter me, would that_ _Menphina had made my heart of ice and I would not have given it to you!_ )

Perhaps he blacks out for a moment or for a bell. When G’raha opens his eyes again, the pain is the same. The street is the same. Emet-Selch is gone.

0

How big is this city?

It seems to stretch on infinitely, though G’raha supposes he might just be going in circles. Perhaps he will stumble his unknowing way back into that cold, dark little room where he first awoke. When he dies, will Emet-Selch add him to the shades that populate this monument of the dead? Will he wander forever through the streets, half-mad, searching for a place that Emet-Selch hasn’t touched in a city Emet-Selch built?

The thought makes him stumble.

And, because his life is a great cosmic joke, Emet-Selch catches him, holds him like he _cares_.

“Ask me,” he pleads into G’raha’s hair. “Ask me, and I will save you.”

“ _Never_.” G’raha’s voice is still raw from his laughing spell, grating out of his throat in rusty, barbed syllables. He thinks he hears Emet-Selch sob.

“You will die.”

G’raha debates several responses: “I was always going to,” “Why do you care?” or a top contender, “Let go of me.” His damaged throat and laboring lungs allow him only a quiet _ah_.

Emet-Selch’s grip tightens, and then he lets go, steps back. His face is blank, as though he doesn’t know what emotion to play at now. Not used to being denied, G’raha supposes, feeling uncharitable.

An eon passes, in which the Ascian opens his mouth to speak but makes no sound. G’raha fills the silence with his ragged breathing, the humming and crackling of his crystallized flesh. How strange, to be the loud one of the pair for once. He has experienced such strangeness, in these last bells—minutes—millennia of his life.

But he doesn’t want to wait here for Emet-Selch to find his tongue.

With shuffling steps and the tap of his staff against stone, G’raha walks away.

How strange it is, to be the one to leave.

Does Emet-Selch feel like this, each time he disappears into his cloud of dark aether?

Like he is drowning in the unsaid?

0

“Another lost soul?”

It is not Emet-Selch’s voice, and this startles G’raha more than it should. The shades here speak to each other, yes—but this one is speaking to _him_.

G’raha looks up, and up. The shade crouches, considerately, making things easier on G’raha’s poor neck.

“You must be the Crystal Exarch. I’ve heard tell of you.”

“From the other ghosts?” G’raha rasps, but the shade shakes his head.

“Nay, from the mouth of my dear, foolish friend.” Then he straightens and waves G’raha toward a bench. This is...a public garden? A park? G’raha hadn’t noticed himself coming here, but he has noticed very little since waking in Amaurot. “Sit with me for a spell. You look in need of it.”

G’raha goes with him, drawn toward the shade’s kindness even if it is only an act. How long has he been in this city? How long since the last time someone other than Emet-Selch spoke to him, reached out to him with a kind hand? He cannot begin to guess. His wounds still cut as fiercely as they did when he awoke. Emet-Selch has spoken to him six times...or was it seven? No, it was six. Probably six. Definitely more than five, at the least.

“My name is Hythlodaeus,” the shade breaks through G’raha’s thoughts. “May I have the pleasure of knowing yours?”

“...I...”

“You need not tell me,” Hythlodaeus says, gently. Side-by-side on the bench, G’raha feels as small as a child. “And no, I do not know it already. In all his lovesick rambling about your voice, your hands, your self-sacrificing nature, Emet-Selch did not once mention your name.”

The world grays out around G’raha for a moment, and then snaps back into place as the words finally make it through his skull.

“He...what?”

Hythlodaeus chuckles, tinged with melancholy around the edges. “He speaks to me sometimes. Not often, no, I am but an imperfect shade of the man who was once his friend, but when he has no one else to turn to, I suppose an imperfect shade will do. How sad, that in all these millennia, he has yet to trust another enough to speak to _them_ of his infatuations.”

“...What?” G’raha’s mind feels as though it is frozen in the act of screeching to a halt.

“Did you not know?” Another chuckle, this one brighter. “As I remember him, he was ever terrible at disguising his feelings. Yet more that has changed.”

“He shot me,” G’raha says, sudden and cruel in his need to tear the soft smile from Hythlodaeus’s face. This was a mistake. It was foolish to think one of Emet-Selch’s constructs could—could—this is another of his games, isn’t it? G’raha leaps to his feet, regrets it instantly as the pain nearly makes him tumble head-first into the grass, manages by sheer bloody-mindedness to keep his footing. “He _shot_ me. He yet forces me to live this half-life, dying the wrong way, the destruction of my world all but assured. What excuse do you have for that?”

“Ah.” Hythlodaeus exhales a long, heavy sigh. “Ah, dear me. That foolish friend of mine really never learns, does he? Millennia upon millennia, and he still cannot separate his own mind from Zodiark’s.”

“Is that it?” G’raha’s voice is sharp as a blade. His throat burns, he forces the words out anyway. He is running purely on spite now. “He is tempered, so I should excuse him of all his wrongdoings? He is tempered, so I should forgive the millions of deaths he has caused and will continue to cause?”

“He is tempered,” Hythlodaeus says, “so he is forced to destroy what he loves, lest it prevent him from carrying out Zodiark’s will.”

This, again, freezes G’raha’s thoughts with the force of a sledgehammer to the knees.

“Emet-Selch,” he says, numb, “does not love me.”

Hythlodaeus meets his eyes, and there is a weight of grief there deeper than any shade should possess. “His name is Hades. And he could, if he let himself.”

No. No, no, no, this is not happening. This—had G’raha not already decided this was another of Emet-Selch’s horrible games, another torment to inflict? He cannot take anything this shade, this _fabrication of Emet-Selch’s_ , says seriously.

“You—you are—” Where did his voice go, now? G’raha wrestles it back. “You are _insane_.”

He turns, and tries to flee the conversation. His wounds limit him to a slow stagger, and he feels Hythlodaeus’s gaze on his back until he finally, thank the Twelve, turns around the corner of a building.

And continues his slow search for a place to die in peace.

Later, G’raha will realize that, so distracted was he, he never asked what Hythlodaeus meant by “another lost soul.”

0

There, a flicker in the corner of his eye, G’raha thinks he sees Y’shtola. Years ago, he might have caught the tail of Alphinaud’s braid disappearing into a doorway.

Would that he could talk to them. See them again. All the things he would say.

 _Lyna_ , he thinks. _I am so sorry, Lyna. Blueberry, Juniper, Gillie, Lilybell. Everyone. I failed._

Here, at least, it is quiet. G’raha could lay down here, could rest. He is so tired. He does not even have the energy to stop walking. His world has narrowed—there is pain, and there is the spot he will place his foot, and there is a flicker, again, gone before he can truly see it.

Was it the hem of Juniper’s robe? He is dreaming while awake now, dreaming of friends long lost. When...when—she fell to Black Rose while he slept in the Tower, didn’t she? When he woke, there were arcanists in her signature royal blue, each bearing her name like a title. There was the Circle of Thaumaturges, wearing the same facepaint as Blueberry, that bold stripe across the eyes. The disciples of Gillie’s Fist. Lilybell’s Daughters. He knew then that they were all dead, else they would not allow themselves to be so venerated.

When…?

When was it?

No, that was—he went back, didn’t he?

G’raha pitches forward, catches himself on a wall, and breathes slow. He went back, and sideways. This is the First—probably still the First, anyway. And what does it matter, when the outcome is the same? They’re all dead again.

There will be no third chance.

0

Left foot. Right foot.

Left foot. Right foot.

Left foot. Right—

A burst of aether, the sound of teeth gritting.

Emet-Selch elbows his way back into G’raha’s universe.

“ _Ask me!_ ” he demands. “Ask me to heal you, you stubborn, bullheaded, suicidal fool!”

Left foot. Right foot.

“Damn you! Why will you not _ask me!_ ”

Left foot.

Emet-Selch disappears with a bellow of rage.

Right foot.

0

Lucidity is becoming a rarer and rarer commodity. G’raha cannot hold onto it for long. When he has it, he wishes it away. When it slips his grasp, he regrets the loss.

His mind has just resurfaced from the depths when Emet-Selch barrels out of a portal, wild-eyed and rabid, incensed by Twelve only know what. G’raha is exhausted in an instant, in an age, by yet another round of this awful game.

“Why? Why must you do this?” Emet-Selch raves, keeping pace alongside. If he wants an audience, he will have to chase it down, for G’raha refuses to stop for him this time. Cannot stop, does not know how to. He has walked a thousand years, he has walked until all he knows is how to walk forward.

“Do you enjoy spiting me like this? Do you want to die in agony, when you could have lived the rest of your life in comfort and dignity instead? Is this your idea of revenge?”

“You already have your victory,” G’raha rasps, most of his focus on his feet. “Why must you...”

When does it end? When will he be allowed peace? Is he already a shade, as he feared becoming? He came here when the universe was young, it seems, and now both he and the universe are trembling with age.

He never finished his thought, he realizes. His mouth is still open around the next word, so he allows it to fall out: “...continue to torment me? Either strike me down now or let me die how I wish.”

“No!” Emet-Selch surges into G’raha’s path, seizes him by the shoulders and presses their foreheads together. The Garlean third eye is like a cold marble, but the skin around it is feverishly hot. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to go! This isn’t—you’re not—!” His tongue seems to tangle on the words, and he descends into garbled, furious sound.

G’raha allows his body go limp in Emet-Selch’s grasp. _We must both conserve our strength_. G’raha has none left, so he prevails upon Emet-Selch’s to keep him upright. “You’ve won. What more could you possibly want?”

“I want—I want—I _want—”_ Emet-Selch raises one hand to claw at his own throat, the other arm wrapping G’raha into a tighter embrace. G’raha closes his eyes. “Wait—Stay awake. Please. Ask me.”

“I think I liked you, once,” G’raha murmurs into the cloth at Emet-Selch’s neck. There is a choking sound, he knows not from where. “A long, long time ago. You smiled at me and it was bright, bright, bright…” He is so tired. So tired. Perhaps it would be alright to rest here a while…

“Raha, _please!_ ”

And then there are hands cradling G’raha’s face, and lips on his, and a sound like a sob bursting out between them both as Emet-Selch kisses him like the fate of the world lives behind G’raha’s teeth. G’raha breathes _Hades_ into the man’s mouth, raises his own hands, to push away or to pull closer he does not have the chance to find out—

—he tastes salt and dark aether, and he falls through the empty space Hades had occupied a breath before.

 _He could, if he let himself_ , G’raha remembers, on his knees and covering his face with hands that shake like autumn leaves. The shake travels up his arms, into his shoulders, down his spine until his whole body is heaving with it, curled in on itself and utterly, utterly alone. G’raha cries and does not know which of a thousand reasons is the cause. All he knows, in this moment, is grief: For the Warriors of Light, those four sisters lost and lost once more. For the people of the Crystarium, doomed by his failure. For Lyna, his daughter in all but name. For the suffering, the uncountable deaths his failure will cause.

For Hades. For himself. For futures that almost were, that could have been, that never will be. For a kiss that tasted like a goodbye.

Once the flood of tears has ebbed to a trickle, G’raha takes hold of his staff once more. He rises again to his feet.

He walks on.

0

(There is, by grace and by mercy, by willpower, by luck, and by sheer bloody-mindedness—oh,

there is indeed a third chance.)

**Author's Note:**

> why yes, g'raha does spend that whole time just barely missing the Scions like a scooby doo chase sequence where the monster goes through one door just as shaggy comes out another.  
> there's like, 100,000 words of backstory to this fic, mostly focusing on juniper and her bad life choices, but that'll get written some other day.


End file.
